YouTube announces more steps towards banning hate and misinformation

For some time now, social platforms have been trying to prevent and combat hateful content on the internet, and YouTube has taken its own series of steps towards that goal. Today, the company announced even more of those, expanding on some of its previous policy changes.

For starters, YouTube will now outright forbid videos that claim that a specific group of people is inherently superior to others based on race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. Likewise, videos that deny well-documented violent events, such as the Holocaust or the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting will also be banned.

This change expands on the steps taken in 2017, when Google banned these kinds of videos from being monetized and disabled the share and comment features for those videos. YouTube says these steps reduced engagement with these videos by up to 80%, but it seems that's not enough.

YouTube is also working to reduce engagement with videos that don't exactly violate its policies, but get very close to doing so, such as videos that promote questionable cures for serious problems or claim that the earth is flat. The company stopped recommending these videos to U.S. users earlier this year, and now it's looking to bring it to more places around the world before the end of the year. Google also says the system is getting smarter, and that it will be applied to even more videos going forward.

To go along with this, the recommended videos will start surfacing more results from "authoritative sources", which are likely to have more reliable and factual information about the subject the user is engaging in. This sort of recommendation was heard of all the way back at the end of 2017, and it should help educate people on controversial topics.

Lastly, YouTube will strengthen the enforcement of its policies for the YouTube Part Program, so that creators which repeatedly challenge those policies are suspended from the program. This means they won't be able to monetize their videos through ads or features like Super Chats.